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Users Find Renting a Movie On iTunes Frees Up Space On iPhone, iPad
An anonymous reader writes: Many, if not all, believe that 16GB storage on their iPhone and iPad is not sufficient. Apple insists that users with 16GB variant iDevice can always save files to the cloud. At any rate, several users have found an interesting way to free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad. The trick is to rent a movie from iTunes (on your mobile device) that is larger than the storage you have available. If you have 500MB free, for instance, you could try and rent Bridge of Spies, which is a 5.79GB download, according to an article on BetaNews. "When you click Rent, a loading symbol will appear but then you'll receive a message informing you that "there is not enough available storage" to download the film, and you'll be given the option of managing your storage in Settings. Tap the Settings button, and -- ta-da! -- you should see the amount of free storage you now have is much greater than before. Repeating the process will free up even more space."
ding ding ding! This is correct.
I recently had my wife saying she couldn't take any pictures because there was no more free storage.
So, go to the storage settings and just check what's using it all, right?
Wrong. It doesn't even show you how much is actually being used. It tells you a number M that is in use, a number L that's free (in this case: 0MB), yet somehow advertised storage capacity N is much greater than the M it gives you - and you can't even make sense of it by thinking it must be the OS.
So you go into manage storage thinking that at least you can clear some stuff up out of there, right?
Wrong. Take the Photos app. In the manage storage settings, it will happily tell you that it's using, say, 500MB - even though there's 1GB of photos and oh hey look under "recently deleted" which apparently it ignores by design.. there's another 4GB of videos the nieces took and the wife wisely deleted-but-not-really.
So you google that shit and the interwebs tell you that you should hook it up to a computer and manage it from there. And by that they mean, install iTunes. And by 'manage' the mean sync it first. And by 'manage' they mean "good luck. with that." because you still don't really get a clearer view of where in the fuck the your storage space went.
In the end we factory reset the thing, re-linked the account to get settings, contacts, etc. back, and enjoyed all the freed up space.
Short of Apple deciding that maybe offering this natively as an option or at least getting their math right, I'll certainly be happy to use the method described in the article in the future.
"They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy"
To quote you, "Bullshit"
What's Behind Apple's Epic Memory Markup :
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...